John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Adams’ friends would not leave off goading him into action. In early 1823, Joseph Hopkinson, the Pennsylvania legislator, wrote in near despair to Louisa that she must persuade her husband to stop blocking every effort by his friends to advance his candidacy. Hopkinson accused Adams of adopting the policy of the wavering Macbeth when he says, “If chance will have me king, why chance will crown me / Without my stir.” When Louisa showed the letter to her husband, a combination of literary playfulness and a deep sense of resolution moved him to respond with a letter he titled “The Macbeth Policy.” Had Macbeth only adhered to such a policy, Adams observed, “no tragedy.” In any case, Adams went on, in a democracy what matters is the choice of voters, not the will of would-be leaders. He then imagined Hopkinson responding that the choice was, in fact, being made by “politicians and newspapers,” whom the candidate needed to cultivate. “Here we come to the point,” Adams wrote, throwing off the mask of irony. “He who asks or accepts the offer of friendly service contracts the obligation of meeting it with a suitable return. . . . If he asks or accept the aid of one, he must ask or accept multitudes.” The only choice is to ask or accept nothing. The first alternative is “vitally and essentially corrupt.” The latter is “the only principle to which no exception can be taken.” Here was true republicanism, as John Quincy Adams understood it.

  Adams would, of course, become president, and he would do so by finally throwing off the Macbeth Policy. He would relax his iron principles in order to be president, and that compromise would come to haunt him.

  JOHN QUINCY ADAMS HAD A STREAK OF ICONOCLASM, OF INDIFFERENCE to received wisdom or to appearance, which was so pronounced that it often took the form of eccentricity. He was notorious for his neglect of dress; Adams would have been mystified that Stratford Canning’s assessment of him would have begun with a reference to his looks. He still wrote poetry—he even amused himself trying to copy the versification of Byron, whom staid men like Canning considered utterly corrupt. Adams took up hobbies to the point of mania. He had begun swimming during the torrid summer of 1817. By 1823 he had become perhaps the most dedicated swimmer in the nation’s capital. At dawn, Adams and his servant, Antoine, would walk an hour to the Potomac. Adams would strip off his clothes to reveal his pale flesh and slightly tubby form, place a pair of goggles on his balding skull, and then jump in. At the beginning of June, he and Antoine swam for thirty-five minutes. Two weeks later, they were up to an hour, then an hour and a quarter. Swimming, he decided, should be taught in school.

  One day, as an experiment, Adams swam in his pants and stockings. That, too, he thought, should be taught in school. A few weeks later, he found himself fighting against a strong tide. He made a mental note: add that to the curriculum. The very next day he got trapped again far from the shore in a powerful tide and was barely able to fight his way back to the rock where he had left his clothes. By August he was swimming for almost two hours; faithful Antoine paddled behind in a canoe, which Adams would enter at points where the river grass rose too high. The two men never saw another soul, much less another boat. If anything went amiss, there would be no prospect of help. “It sometimes occures to me,” Adams wrote sagely, “that this exercise and amusement as I am now indulging in is with the constant risk of life. Perhaps that is the reason, why so few persons ever learn to swim.”

  Adams left for Quincy in late August 1823. He sent a note to President Kirkland saying that he would be unable to attend commencement. Kirkland would not have had to wonder why—in May, John Adams II had been the ringleader of a group of seniors who had rioted over the arrest of one of their numbers. Kirkland had reacted by kicking the secretary of state’s son out of Harvard. Adams had written to ask if John could receive his diploma nonetheless. The answer was no. This was a dreadful blow for both father and son, who had actually been improving his performance until then. Fortunately, Charles, who in his freshman year had written to his mother and brother George—but not his father—that he had fallen into “depraved habits” and was thinking of dropping out of school, had now found his footing and begun moving up in the class standing. Only Charles, it would turn out, had the inner oak of an Adams.

  But Harvard was still very much in Adams’ blood. He had written to other prominent alumni with the hope of raising funds to build an observatory at the college and endow a chair in astronomy. This had been one of Adams’ enthusiasms ever since he had first stared through a telescope in the Philosophy Chamber of Harvard Hall. President Kirkland agreed to use a $20,000 bequest he had received for the purpose, at least as soon as the donor’s widow died. Adams gave $1,000 of his own and began to contemplate where the telescope would best be placed, far from the lights of town.

  His father was now bowed down with years, though mentally alert. Adams had asked Gilbert Stuart to make one last portrait of the old patriot—a painting that shows the eighty-eight-year-old ex-president with a still-appraising glance and an unyielding set to his mouth, and hangs today in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Adams paid a visit with his father to the Thaxters, old family friends. (John Thaxter had served as tutor to six-year-old Johnny.) The visit brought back ancient memories, and Adams spent the evening alone, lost in his reflections. Soon, very soon, he would be the family patriarch. Perhaps it was this thought that set him browsing for the first time through the old family records in the Braintree church. He traced the lineage back to his great-great-great-grandfather Henry, one of Braintree’s original settlers. He found records of his mother’s family, the Quincys, including the grant of Mt. Wollaston to Edmund Quincy in 1633.

  In his July 4 address Adams had spoken of the mystical ties that bind people to their native soil. For him this was no mere abstraction. His ancestors had roamed across the rough ground of Braintree since white people had first arrived on those shores, and they roamed there still. In their vigorous and irreproachable uprightness, still adamantine in the last years of life, and their flinty independence and self-sufficiency, the Adamses partook of the New England earth. And John Quincy Adams, who had traveled across the world, was happiest among the rugged rocks of his native town, as he had written from Europe at age ten. America was changing fast, but the Adamses, for better and for worse, were rooted to the spot. That sharp, thin line in the Adams mouth was the mark of fixity.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Most Important Paper That Ever Went from My Hands

  (1822–1823)

  WHAT KIND OF NATION WAS AMERICA TO BE? VIRTUALLY all Americans believed that their country was different in nature from the nations of Europe, for it had been founded on principle, not conquest. How was a principled power to behave in an unprincipled world? The United States would not seek colonies, as European powers did. Would it permit them to survive on its own continent? Would it seek to evict them? America’s great and successful experiment with republicanism had inspired brave men to fight for their freedom elsewhere in the world. What would Americans say when they asked for help? “Go thou and do likewise!,” John Quincy Adams had proclaimed at the end of his July 4 oration—go, that is, and seize power from tyrants. Adams would confine America to the role of spectator of this great drama. But prudent circumspection was not very much in the American grain. Henry Clay and many other leading figures believed that the United States could and should play a transformative role in the world.

  These great questions had remained latent during the decades when America’s weakness had dictated a policy of defensive isolation behind its ocean barrier. But that fledgling era had drawn to an end; new powers required a new vision. In his July 4 oration and elsewhere, Adams had shown Americans the path he believed they needed to take. No other public figure of his generation had offered so cogent and deeply considered an answer to the question of America’s role in the world. In the ensuing years, Adams would continue to argue inside the Monroe administration for his brand of assertive realism. And he would succeed: the supreme formulation of early-nineteenth-century American foreign policy known as the Monroe
Doctrine would overwhelmingly bear Adams’ stamp.

  By the middle of 1822, the struggle between Spain and the South American colonies was largely over. One prize, however, remained in Spain’s shaky grasp: Cuba. The small island just off the Florida coast was a source of great wealth both for Spain and for the United States: fifty American ships arrived every month at Havana harbor and returned home with coffee, sugar, and molasses. None of the South American republics could compare to Cuba as a trading partner. And with Florida now taken, the incorporation of Cuba seemed inevitable as well as deeply desirable. In the late summer of that year, President Monroe received word that a secret agent who had come from Cuba, a Mr. Sanchez, was seeking to provoke a revolt against Spain in order to gain acceptance as a new American state. In a cabinet meeting September 27, Secretary of War Calhoun said that he was all for it; he knew from correspondence, he added, that former president Jefferson was too. The British profited just as richly from the Cuba trade, and assimilating the island, Calhoun pointed out, would prevent Great Britain from doing so; it would also preclude the dreadful possibility of another “Negro revolt,” like Haiti’s. Jefferson had even said that the United States should be prepared to go to war with England over Cuba.

  Adams wanted Cuba every bit as much as Calhoun or Jefferson did, but everything about the proposed intervention aroused his ingrained skepticism. First, he said, it wasn’t clear whether the executive or legislature even had the constitutional authority to do what Sanchez proposed. Second, Spain would be outraged, as would its allies in the Holy Alliance. Third, in any war with Great Britain in the West Indies, the United States was bound to lose. Adams advised that Monroe say nothing—neither encourage the revolutionaries nor advise them to stick with Spain. Adams believed that Cuba would come to the United States in the fullness of time. In the meanwhile, why jeopardize the lucrative trade as well as relations with Spain and Great Britain? Monroe, who apparently remained silent on the question, decided in Adams’ favor, as he so often did. The issue arose yet again the following March, with the same battle lines and the same outcome. The United States, for all its republican sympathies, acquiesced to Spanish colonial control.

  Cuba had never sparked the public imagination, since most white Americans no more wanted to see a “Negro revolt” than Calhoun did. The great romantic cause of the day was Greece, which had rebelled against the Ottoman mantle in 1821. English intellectuals, including the poets Shelley and Byron, had rallied to the side of the Greek republicans. America, too, was inflamed; newspaper editorials and patriotic societies called for private help, and often an open avowal of support, for the Greek cause. Albert Gallatin, the minister to France and far from a republican hothead, wrote Adams to advocate not only recognition of Greece but the dispatch of naval forces to the Mediterranean. Adams had also received a letter from the self-styled “Envoy of the Provisional Government of Greece” asking for American recognition and aid.

  In Greece the United States faced for the first time a public demand for intervention abroad. President Monroe, a Jeffersonian idealist who had championed the French Revolution, had planned to endorse the Greek cause in his 1822 message to Congress; Adams had succeeded in watering down the language to a vague expression of sympathy. In August 1823, Monroe raised the subject in the cabinet. Crawford and Calhoun supported Gallatin’s suggestion; no one opposed it, save Adams. “Calhoun descanted upon his great enthusiasm for the cause of the Greeks,” Adams noted caustically; “he was for taking no heed of Turkey whatever.” Adams replied that he “thought not quite so lightly of a war with Turkey.” And Calhoun had no practical plan for aiding the Greek patriots. “I have not much esteem for the enthusiasm which evaporates in words,” Adams wrote. The discussion came to naught, just as Adams had hoped. It had foundered on practicalities, but for Adams the deep issue was whether the goal of American foreign policy was to shape a better world or to advance American interests. “Enthusiasm”—public passion—dictated the first; the lonelier counsels of prudence, the latter.

  A very different, and perhaps more serious, problem was presented by Russia, a continental power with its own rising ambitions. Since the early eighteenth century Russia had claimed territory across the Bering Strait in Alaska and Canada, and in September 1821, Tsar Alexander had renewed the privileges and the exclusive trading rights of the so-called Russian-American Trading Company, extending its territorial limits from the fifty-fifth to the fifty-first parallel (the latitude of Calgary, 160 miles north of the current border between the United States and Canada). At the same time, and even more provocatively from the American point of view, he banned all foreign ships from 100 miles of the claimed coastline. This claim plainly conflicted with the British-American treaty of 1818, which established joint control over the Northwest from the forty-second parallel to a point that had not been established. Both London and Washington forcibly rejected the claim. And the tsar may have had second thoughts, for Henry Middleton, the American minister in Russia, wrote to Adams in late 1822 to say that Alexander had dispatched a new minister, Baron de Tuyll, to the United States in order to resolve the issue.

  By the summer of 1823, the two nations had agreed to continue negotiations in Russia. Adams maintained that the United States should not accept the validity of any Russian possessions on the continent save for a few islands, but none of his colleagues were prepared to go as far. Monroe instead ordered Adams to instruct Middleton to accept Russian’s claims above the fifty-fifth parallel but not below. Adams was clearly writing through gritted teeth. When the very genial and gracious Baron de Tuyll came to Adams’ office in July to ask about the instructions to Middleton—it was his job to be in the know, as he pointed out—Adams said that the United States “should contest the right of Russia, to any territorial Establishment on this Continent; and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American Continents are no longer subjects for any new European Colonial Establishments.”

  The instructions to Middleton had conceded Russia’s right to territory, and thus to a colony, on the American continent. But Adams spoke to de Tuyll as if he had won the argument in the cabinet. Adams had been working out his principle of noncolonization at least since the time of the Independence Day message. In instructions to Richard Rush written in July 1823, he wrote that the American continent, “occupied by civilized independent nations,” would henceforward “be accessible to Europeans and to each other on that footing alone, and the Pacific Ocean in every part of it will remain open to navigation of all nations, in like manner with the Atlantic.” Adams objected to colonization in principle, but he was stipulating as a matter of doctrine that no new colonies would be allowed in the Americas—“Keep what is yours, but leave the rest of this Continent to us,” as he had said to Canning. Adams had not deviated in the slightest from the principles he had enunciated in the opening months of his tenure as secretary of state: restraint in the face of Europe’s internal affairs, resolution and even high-handed assertiveness on territory at home.

  The most disquieting event of this period was the growing aggressiveness of the Holy Alliance. At the Tropau Conference of 1820, the signatories had bound themselves “to bring back the guilty state”—guilty, that is, of republican government—“in the bosom of the Great Alliance,” by means of arms if need be. They made good on their vow the following year, when Austrian armies put down republican movements in Naples and the Piedmont. At the Conference of Verona in October 1822, Alexander had offered to send an army of 150,000 men into Europe to continue this providential work and above all to restore King Ferdinand to the Spanish throne. Instead King Louis XVIII of France agreed to rescue his fellow Bourbon, and in the spring of 1823 a French army routed the republicans.

  The Spanish royalists still hungered to regain control over South America and had some hope that France might help. François, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, the great essayist and memoirist and, at that time, foreign minister, persuaded the French council of state to adopt his plan to inst
all Bourbon princes on the throne of the new South American nations, possibly with the help of French arms. It was never an entirely serious proposition and in any case was meant to be contingent on reforms adopted by Ferdinand to make his own rule less onerous—reforms the feckless and brutal monarch was never going to adopt. But France’s plans did worry the Monroe administration, as well as Great Britain, which was not about to sacrifice its commercial relations with South America to fall victim to reactionary French dreams.

  It’s impossible to be certain just how worried Adams or Monroe was about French or Allied plans in South America. Adams’ journal has served as an indispensable guide for historians of this period, and Adams left off journalizing from January 11 to June 2, 1823. It seems, however, that what preoccupied Adams in the summer and fall of 1823 was not the prospect of a fight, whether for American or South American soil, but rather a clash of systems—of republicanism and royalism, of the rule of the citizen versus absolute power. The tsar, the Bourbons, and Prince Metternich viewed the American system as an infectious virus to be contained (though Alexander, to be fair, continued to have a soft spot for the United States). Adams was quite certain that the American system was the wave of the future, but for that very reason he knew that America had stirred up a violent and possibly dangerous reaction. He and the president and the other chief members of the administration knew that Great Britain, with its constitutional traditions and liberal sympathies, was trying to straddle both sides; they needed England to stand apart from Continental Europe but not necessarily to stand with the United States as an actual ally, for neutrality remained a core American principle. If the United States was to draw clear lines between systems, it would have to do so without clumsily alienating powerful states whose ambitions it still feared.